Introduction:

Health-related quality of life, as a positive indicator that evaluates the health-disease process, has been gaining more use, due to the change in morbidity patterns, generated by demographic aging.

Objective:

To characterize health-related quality of life from the nomothetic perspective and its relationship with variables of people and time.

Methods:

A descriptive and cross-sectional study was carried out with 200 adults with a diagnosis of diabetes mellitus, hypertension, or both, cared for at Daniel Álvarez center, in Loja, who met several criteria. Means and standard deviations were calculated, together with percentages. Significance tests such as ANOVA, comparison of means in independent samples, and analysis of contingency tables were carried out, using likelihood ratio, with a significance level of 5%.

Results:

The average score for quality of life was 2.90, without significant associations with the variables investigated (P>0.05). The physical (3.30) and social relations (3.09) dimensions scored higher, while the psychological (2.71) and the environmental (2.70) scored lower. Only schooling, for the psychological dimension (P=0.03), was significantly associated with its achieved score.

Conclusions:

The global health-related quality of life in the adults under study, from a nomothetic perspective, showed an acceptable level, not associated with any of the variables analyzed. The psychological and environmental domains obtained the worst scores, while the physical and social relations dimensions exhibited levels higher than the global one.

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